Vacation Relation: Travel Innovation Summit

What do they do? Vacation Relation will use existing social tools to allow users to “investigate the social aspects of their vacation” before they leave home. Using the site, travelers will be able to find out who else will be at their vacation destination.

Are they a business-to-business (B2B) company, or business-to-consumer (B2C)? B2C

Founder(s): Peter Sullivan and David Los are the founders of Vacation Relation, and the company is based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Date Founded: 2010

Presentation Notes: Everyone wants to incorporate social media in travel planning, but your friends on Facebook who aren’t going on your trip may not care about your trip. The people who will care about your trip are other people who are going to be at the same place you’ll be going. Vacation Relation allows you to use the social media platforms you’re already using (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to connect with people who are going to the same place you’re going. When you enter information about an upcoming trip into Vacation Relation, you’ll see the other people who have also added themselves to a similar trip. It pulls information from their profiles into Vacation Relation, so you don’t have to be (for instance) Facebook friends in order to “socialize” with them on Vacation Relation. You can also filter by activities, special interests, etc. from within that group of travelers to find people who are even more similar to you. You can go so far as to see other people staying in your same hotel (you can also choose not to show where you’re staying in your privacy settings). When you’re done with a trip, you can easily remove your information from Vacation Relation if you like.

Why should/shouldn’t travelers care? For travelers who like connecting with other travelers, this might be a really interesting tool – especially since it’s pulling information from your existing social media profiles, rather than requiring you to create a whole new profile on a site without an existing community. To be successful, this clearly needs critical mass – without enough people using it, you could be the only person listed as going to a particular location. Assuming they get that critical mass, however, it could be an organized way to facilitate the kinds of meetings that take place in hostel common rooms.